66 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
of illness, the testament of a writer brac-
ingly committed to everything that, in
Virginia Woolf ’s words, “the cautious
respectability of health conceals.” For-
get Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases
shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert in-
habited AIDS as though it were a dark-
room or an astronomical observatory,
a means for deciphering the patterns
in life’s dying light.
U
ntil recently, Hervé Guibert was
not widely read in English. “To the
Friend” was translated in 1991 but re-
ceived mixed reviews in America: too
sexually and medically explicit for main-
stream audiences, yet too politically de-
tached for a gay community then en-
gaged in a life-or-death struggle for
recognition. One reviewer for the Lambda
Book Report wrote, “ACT UP, Hervé. ACT
UP. Or get new friends.”
A younger generation has proved
more receptive to his raw, genre-bending
body of work. In a spate of new trans-
lations, Guibert has emerged as a fore-
runner of today’s most prominent gay
writers of autofiction, such as Édouard
Louis, Garth Greenwell, and Ocean
Vuong. Guibert has even inspired (fic-
tional) pilgrims, as he once predicted;
in Andrew Durbin’s novella “Skyland”
(Nightboat), two young men search for
a lost portrait of the writer on the is-
land of Patmos.
Born in 1955, Hervé Guibert grew
up in Paris and La Rochelle. His mother
was a former teacher, and his father was
a veterinary inspector who worked at a
slaughterhouse. They were conserva-
tive, middle class, and disconcertingly
obsessed with their son’s hygiene, for
which he later repaid them with a shock-
ingly granular tell-all novel, “Mes Par-
ents” (1986). Meanwhile, the young
Guibert thrilled to Edgar Allan Poe
stories and masturbated to stills from
Fellini’s “Satyricon.” “At fifteen, before
I wrote anything,” he once wrote, “I un-
derstood wealth, celebrity, and death.”
He moved back to Paris at the age
of seventeen, hoping to become an actor
or a scriptwriter. Rejected from film
school, he quickly rebounded into the
world of magazines. By twenty, he was
contributing dating advice to 20 Ans, a
glossy marketed to young women; in
his spare time, he wrote stories about
voyeurism, dissection, cruising, and in-
cestuous childhood memories. “I have
a lyrical ass,” he boasted in his first col-
lection, which appeared, in 1977, as “La
Mort Propagande.”
A striking blond with unruly curls
and the haughtily vacant expression of
an anime villain, Guibert turned many
heads. Friends compared him to an
angel, a bad boy from a Pasolini film,
and even “a little brother to Lucifer.”
Edmund White, who met Guibert in
Michel Foucault’s circle, described him
as “hyacinthine, ringleted, foggyvoiced.”
Roland Barthes once tried to sleep with
the younger writer, later analyzing his
rejection in a long, wounded letter. (“By
leaving so hurriedly,” Barthes told Gui-
bert, you “constructed me as a seducer.”)
Guibert published it.
He was as enraptured by images as
others were by him. Joining Le Monde
as a photography critic in 1978, he si-
multaneously established himself as
a photographer, publishing a photo-
roman with strikingly intimate portraits
of his great-aunts. Soon afterward, he
wrote “Ghost Image” (1981), reissued in
Robert Bononno’s translation in 2014,
a beautiful and insightful collection of
essays on the portraiture of family al-
bums, photo-booth film strips, por-
nographic Polaroids, and other ephem-
eral genres. Guibert arrives at a vision
of photography as tactile, fetishistic,
and inseparable from the frustrations
of desire.
A vanishingly thin boundary sepa-
rated his art from his private life. Often
befriending the celebrities he wrote
about—such as the actresses Gina Lol-
lobrigida and Isabelle Adjani—he por-
trayed loved ones as though they were
celebrities, idolizing and exposing them
by turns. “With each book, I place ex-
orbitant demands on my friends, abu-
sive demands for love,” he told an in-
terviewer in 1990. “But I’ve been very
lucky. My friends have never censored
or put me down.”
In “Crazy for Vincent” (1989), a
highly entertaining erotic novella, trans-
lated by Christine Pichini in 2017, Gui-
bert dramatized his relationship with
an impulsive teen-age lover. Vincent’s
wild life style and unpredictable appe-
tites—for coke, heroin, girls, and, inter-
mittently, Hervé—leave his suitor des-
perate enough to call the boy’s family
home: “‘What’s it about?’ asks Vincent’s
mother; urge to respond, ‘It’s about his
cock, Madame, I need to suck it as soon
as possible.’”
The Guibert revival’s capstone has
been Semiotext(e)’s reissue, this year,
of “To the Friend Who Did Not Save
My Life,” published in tandem with a
career-spanning collection of short sto-
ries, entitled “Written in Invisible Ink.”
They reveal a writer of courage, be-
guiling flair, and sometimes madden-
ing nastiness, who made the body his
subject long before his own turned
against him.
The several dozen stories of “Written
in Invisible Ink,” artfully translated by
Jeffrey Zuckerman, read like schoolyard
confessions carved into a desk. Sur-
veying Guibert’s work from 1975 to
1989, the book reveals a young writer
confident in his themes yet restlessly
experimental in expression. Realist
vignettes alternate with fairy tales,
ghost stories, and descriptions of imag-
inary erotic machines. In one story, a
knife-thrower tricks the narrator into
agreeing to perform as his partner (in
drag); in another, a man steals a wax
head of Jeanne d’Arc. The over-all im-
pression is that of a writer in search of
shapes for his unruly energy, as though
picking through limbs in an anato-
mist’s workshop.
Many of Guibert’s stories originated
as clippings from his diary, and the best
ones have a sketch-like immediacy. They
often begin with someone failing to call
or to show up and end just as arbitrarily,
unbeholden to the rules of gradual ex-
position or epiphany. The narrator of
“A Kiss for Samuel” (1982) arrives in
Florence to photograph dioramas at a
famous wax museum, only to learn that
it’s closed for the next six days. He ends
up wandering the city’s train station
with a nineteen-year-old Sicilian boy,
searching for a place to kiss.
Other, more sinister stories revolve
around codependent relationships. In
“For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink,” a
ghostwriter’s collaboration with a dis-
tinguished intellectual develops into a
wordless struggle for dominance. The
narrator wants friendship and acknowl-
edgment, but his employer snubs him,
routinely forcing him to wait outside
his apartment like a dog. A similar but
reversed dynamic plays out in “The De-
sire to Imitate,” a darkly comic tale about
